131–140 of 652 posts
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And then you'll turn it back on and feel the lifting of a significant mental burden. Autocomplete has never been about the speed of typing things, and always about finding and recalling abstractions that you sort of know but haven't committed to strong memory yet.
Or for switching between many languages without having to work on remembering if it's lowercase, lower, tolower, lcase, or to_lower this time.
The shell is my development environment. I open up new terminals and shells willy nilly. I find cli tools like find/fd/grep/rg are useful because I rarely need to find only the definition of a function, but rather other call sites too, to find out how it is being used. I think being surrounded by the code and being able to slice and dice it leads to a certain kind of familiarity that a tool that takes you right there…
The shell is my development environment. I open up new terminals and shells willy nilly. I find cli tools like find/fd/grep/rg are useful because I rarely need to find only the definition of a function, but rather other call sites too, to find out how it is being used. I think being surrounded by the code and being able to slice and dice it leads to a certain kind of familiarity that a tool that takes you right there…
I did it this way for about 20 years and recently moved to VSCode with its integrated terminal. It makes me feel pretty lazy and like I’m “cheating”, but there are some productivity benefits (LSP), and I’m less of a purist than I used to be. I maintained a blog about vim for 3-4 years, so I was pretty committed to that workflow back in the day.
Typing the whole thing, while having manuals open for quick cross-checking.
Using text search tools to find code.
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> I don't really understand the aversion to using these tools No one is yucking your yum, it's not an aversion, it's that we don't need them, it never really occurs to us to use them, just like it never occurs to you to not use them. You make it sound like people who don't use them are fumbling and tripping over themselves and aren't actually writing any software.
> it never really occurs to us to use them, just like it never occurs to you to not use them. This doesn't really make sense, either. How do you not consider the right tool for the job? Do you just use whatever you learned to code and never really bothered to consider that you might be more or less productive with different tools? LSPs don't always offer a productivity increase in all contexts—they seem to be mostly…
every line of code is a liability. every line of code needs to be thought about. every line of code is precious.
spamming autocomplete means i’m not thinking about what i’m doing, even the simple stuff like writing a for loop statement.
I write code. I mostly remember things but I check the documentation often.
Docs.rs is always open.
Then I compile it and fix the compiler errors. The Rust compiler errors are very nice and friendly. So it's not that difficult.
I mean that's how C and C++ programmers worked for many many years.
You should try turning off those features yourself for at least a month and see what happens ;) You’ll learn the answers yourself, much better than us trying to explain them. You’ll learn where all the reference docs live for your language, libraries, and frameworks, and along the way you’ll learn more by actually reading the docs. You’ll learn the value of good project organization and file naming, and explicit impo…
Autocomplete is more for discoverability than saving on typed characters, letting you rely less on documentation and more on the actual interface you're interacting with
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Autocomplete is more for discoverability than saving on typed characters, letting you rely less on documentation and more on the actual interface you're interacting with
I’m curious as how it lets you rely less on documentation. If you don’t know what you’re looking for then how will you know you chose the right thing? The classic example of getting this wrong is probably C# developers using IEnumerable when they should’ve used IQueryable.
The closest thing coming to mind to me is mixing up IEnumerable and IEnumerator when trying to define a coroutine.
Added: it helps a lot to have real documentation, something that has gone out of fashion in recent years. Maybe these IDE's are being used as a substitute. I hadn't thought of it that way before. Hmm.
Added 2: Also, Emacs has always had TAGS (this quick navigates the editor to a function's definition given its name) and I do use that sometimes.